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Just wondering if you have taken any logs of the car and if there is any knock counts or knock retard showing up while you are hearing the noise?
My valve train has always been a little noisier when hot and I recently just started showing knock retard only at idle when the motor is warm. Have not had the time to look into it further though.
Thanks for posting about the torq head alternator BTW. I think I am going to have to get one of those!
Yeah i log with hptuners on the street and at the dyno. I also have a scanner gauge in my piller pod with knock on display most of the time and at no point do i ever see any knock retard.
That alternator is amazing. Taking it off to do anything on the passenger side has always been my biggest annoyance, not anymore!
Got emails back from Lloyd and Golen, both said they don't know what the noise could be. With the amount of years they each have under their belts I find that slightly hard to believe but whatever. At this point I'm just gonna keep using it as my daily until something happens
Finally took the engine apart again tonight after beating on it mercilessly all summer long. The worst case scenario in my head was finding the cam and lifters all chewed up but for the most part I think everything looks really good. The rocker arms are totally unremarkable. They look perfect. The pushrods look like this:
You can see they are rubbing in all different areas, not just where it goes through the guide plate. This reinforces (for me anyway) one of my original ideas that the ticking is the pushrods making contact with the guide plates and heads. I wasn't able to get a good view of the pushrod tunnel areas in the heads but there didn't appear to be any obvious damage or missing aluminum. Four of the guide plates had marks like this:
Remember from earlier in the thread that I adjusted these guide plates to center the valve sweep so even though I'm seeing marks like this I'm hesitant to adjust again now that sweep is on point.
The lifters looked good with one exception. This is cylinder 7 intake:
You can see the rim of that hole is all chewed up. Cylinder 2 exhaust has the beginnings of something similar it looks like. These have 50,000 miles on them. All the lifter bores and cam lobes look good as far as I can tell:
I want to replace those 2 lifters so I'm going to shop around and see if that's possible to buy just 2.
While I was in the neighborhood I replaced the oil pump drive gear housing (thanks again for spotting the crack atlantadan) and used a washer to distribute the load a little better so hopefully this one lasts as long as the engine.
Possible that with the cam lift and spring pressure the PR could be "wobble" (flex) causing that scuff. There would normally be a "slight" witness mark on PR where it slides against guide plate but not any nicking or gouge.
if your PR are not 5/16" with .080 thick wall chromoly, get ones that are in the length you need
weird the #7 lifter shows scuffing/nicks but you say the lifter bore itself is clear. I would think the bore would mirror scuff that is on lifter
Did you take a good look at the dog bone to see if it is wallowed out at all letting lifter walk around a little??
The pushrods are 5/16, 0.83 wall thickness. They are 7.25" length, determined after adjusting valve sweep. The dog bones look okay. I see summit sells individual lifters so I'm going to get 2. I'll ask Smith Bros. about the pushrods.
do the wear scuff marks on each PR correlate with the guide plate...or are some hitting the head casting?
In looking at the pic it appears the witness mark is in the normal place where it rubs guide plate...but on some it looks like lower marks also where it could be contacting the head casting. I saw in some of your earlier posts you struggled getting the RR tip where you wanted without having the PR contact head casting so just backed it off "slightly". "Maybe" when motor is hot (metals have expanded) and higher rev/load some sounds that are not there otherwise...maybe the PR are slightly flexing under those conditions and hitting head casting which is giving off a tick sound.
You have been going through a lot of issues with the combo you have which is frustrating
do the wear scuff marks on each PR correlate with the guide plate...or are some hitting the head casting?
In looking at the pic it appears the witness mark is in the normal place where it rubs guide plate...but on some it looks like lower marks also where it could be contacting the head casting. I saw in some of your earlier posts you struggled getting the RR tip where you wanted without having the PR contact head casting so just backed it off "slightly". "Maybe" when motor is hot (metals have expanded) and higher rev/load some sounds that are not there otherwise...maybe the PR are slightly flexing under those conditions and hitting head casting which is giving off a tick sound.
You have been going through a lot of issues with the combo you have which is frustrating
it looks like some are hitting the head. Check this out:
The above pic is #1 intake, it's one of the pushrods that has a wear mark half way down. Looks like this spot on the pushrod correlates to the lower edge of the head. So I have about 6 pushrods that are rubbing here. I tried to get a good shot of where the other witness marks could be from (the ones that are between the mid point of the pushrod and the guide plate witness marks) but it looks like it must be from little ridges on the head in there.
I have been dealing with rare and unique issues literally since I first started this engine back in 2009. It's one of the reasons I was seriously considering going LS3 instead of doing H/C/I. Luckily I got a solid summer of fun with it and it looks like it could survive for a while and make the investment worth it. But there's still plenty of things that need my attention, both under the hood and elsewhere.
"Maybe" when motor is hot (metals have expanded) and higher rev/load some sounds that are not there otherwise...maybe the PR are slightly flexing under those conditions and hitting head casting which is giving off a tick sound.
I just realized that would help explain why the ticking isn't present for the first 30 seconds to 1 minute, the metals haven't expanded yet and the pushrods aren't making contact yet. Good call!
Originally Posted by ******
well you do have contact with casting & PR albeit barely. Maybe this is part of or the major contributor to your engine noise.
I agree. I emailed Golen, Smith Bros., and I'm getting set to email LE
Originally Posted by SS RRR
Shouldn't be too difficult to clearance, or send them back to LE and have them deal with it.
I'm gonna do my sweep again during reassembly and I'll try to squeeze out some extra clearance. I don't even want to think about removing and replacing these heads again.
I have long wondered if the noise I am hearing is related to my TFS heads. Your post makes me think that it is. I will be installing a new intake and TB in the coming weeks and will look for the same issue you have. If I see it on my heads, I don't think getting in there with a file or Dremel and clearancing them would be anything to lose sleep over as long as everything is kept clean.
I think it would be VERY difficult to prevent any grindings to go places you could not catch. Maybe some uber masking of the area could seclude any shavings from getting into motor and they land where they can be cleaned up....but would be a huge pucker factor for me
proceed with caution if attempting clearanceing with assembled motor in car
I think it would be VERY difficult to prevent any grindings to go places you could not catch. Maybe some uber masking of the area could seclude any shavings from getting into motor and they land where they can be cleaned up....but would be a huge pucker factor for me
proceed with caution if attempting clearanceing with assembled motor in car
Yeah, given that I've already pretty much rebuilt this thing within the past 6 months, doing it again is something I'm not eager to do. However, I think that with loads of masking and thick plastic sheet, it could be done. YMMV
Got everything back together and drove the car the last 2 days. The ticking is practically gone. At idle I can barely hear what sounds like 1 pushrod still making contact ever so slightly but that's it. So it looks like it was the pushrods hitting the heads after all. Unfortunately the trade involved my valve sweep going to crap. I think 2 cylinders have actual good looking sweep. The rest have some degree of incomplete contact between the rocker tip and valve. The worst cylinders have less than half the rocker tip making contact with less than half the valve tip. I'm hoping that when the engine gets hot and metals expand, that improves but it's probably just wishful thinking. I don't know what the deal is with these heads but it is impossible to have proper valve sweep without the pushrods making contact with the heads. If I were to have proper valve sweep, a ton of grinding would need to be done.
Here's a picture of one of the good "bad" cylinders. You can see I'm getting about 3/4 contact. Not only would the heads need grinding but the guide plates would need grinding too. All guide plates are hitting the head bolts and I would need to grind them here to get proper sweep. Remember I have already enlarged the rocker stud holes on all the guide plates to get more adjustability but that isn't enough.
Here's a close up of the lifter-guide plate alignment. Notice that if I could put the guide plate where I actually want it, the head is totally in the way. There needs to be a ton of grinding! I also circled where I already ground away the guide plate fingers so they can slide even closer together. All guide plates would need this too. You can also see where the guide plate is making contact with the head bolt just like the last pic.
Sorry I don't have more pictures but I wanted to get this job done. The last pic shows how close the pushrod still is to the head. Notice the left one is nearly touching while the right one has tons of space. When I inspected the pushrods, the one on the right has no witness marks while the one on the left is littered with them.
At this point I have no idea how this can even happen. It's like the heads are for a different engine. I would never recommend these heads to anyone. To recap: I installed the heads completely assembled from Lloyd Elliot (with Trick Flow guide plates) and used my non hardened pushrods that worked great with stock heads. The pushrods ended up getting shaved away by the guide plates because the angle was so much more different. So I bought hardened pushrods but because of that wacky angle, instead of getting shaved away they just popped off the lifters when I started the car. I loosened the rocker studs to push the guide plates down towards the exhaust as much as possible to try and reduce the angle so the pushrods weren't pressed up so hard against the guide plates and that worked, they didn't pop off the lifters anymore. The car ran great but there was a ticking noise and I found that my valve sweep was all jacked up. So I bought Isky guide plates and longer hardened pushrods. After getting everything installed, again the pushrods popped off the lifters because of the steep angle. I then used my dremel to grind all the stud holes and the fingers on some of the guide plates. I was able to drive the car all summer and even raced it. It has ran great all summer except for the ticking. Now I see it's because the pushrods are hitting the heads and the only way to have good valve sweep AND quiet engine operation is to grind the heads and guide plates.
The LT1 has been out for 26 years. There's nothing left to experiment with or figure out. How could cylinder heads be so misaligned this late in the game? I feel like it's due to either laziness or incompetence. When I pay thousands for something that is supposed to bolt on and work, then that's what needs to happen!
Sucks the TFS heads just are not letting you get dead center on the L-R alignment without making contact with the head casting
IDK if you can take off the amount of material without entering some water jacket on those heads. Just weird the castings are not letting you get solid valve train geometry. I got to think several have and do use TFS heads on the LT1 and are not experiencing this. Maybe someone has pics of their RR alignment/PR location they can share to compare
It appears keeping PR spaced some from the head casting has eliminated the ticking noise. Your call on how far off the tip the RR rides on to go with. Long term side loading the valve stem is not good as the guide will wear faster
06-09-2018, 09:37 AM
